Johan van der Keuken

Rejecting linear narrative storytelling, the director offers us an epic on humanity and cultural diversity in Europe through a multitude of appearances, a cartography of faces, the reflection of an imaginary Europe made up of London, Marseille, Prague and the Netherlands.

In this fascinating, four-hour documentary on the international city of Amsterdam, director Johan van der Keuken has taken a careful look at a variety of the city's inhabitants and traced their activities -- or their roots -- out into third-world countries and regions and then always back to the city again. First, a Moroccan courier on a Moped leads a tour up and down the promenades that line the canals. (www.allmovie.com)

A poetic depiction of life and ritual in the south Indian state of Kerala. (imdb)

Style goes beyond exterior stylistic devices. I have shown FILMMAKER'S HOLIDAY and TIME together many times, as they seem to me to be partly dealing with the same: the family (also the non-genetic family you choose in the course of your life), the past and the present sliding into one another, and something I call: the photographic emotion.

Autobiographical documentary by Johan van der Kitchen in which he captures the last journey he will ever make After Johan van der Kitchen was told that he had only a short time to live, he and his wife decided to go Noshka capture., And his latest experiences on film traveling "The big holiday 'has become a very personal travelogue. Autobiographical details and nature pictures rotated in stylistic manner and Van der Kitchen as attempts to achieve. (film1.nl)

New York, Geneva, Hong Kong and Amsterdam are major hubs of the world's economy. Great amounts of money circulate there, and whereas poverty is ubiquitous in the streets of New York, Geneva carefully protects its wealth behind impeccable facades. No one is unaffected by the myth of the all-powerful Dollar: the under-privileged struggle to survive talking about their unattainable dream, while businessmen, from the safe distance of their offices, lay down the tenets of the financial philosophy. (youtube.com)

Environments are seen as the products of social, economic and historical influences. Young Dutch girls carry out their monotonous work on an ice-cream factory assembly line. The life of poor Peruvians is determined by former colonialism, devastated natural resources and resettlement from the mountains to the cheerless slums outside the capital; even so, they still endeavour to improve their conditions by applying methods of socialist autonomy. (kviff.com)

The Palestinians, shot in Lebanon in 1975, shortly before the outbreak of civil is the last of a series of implicitly political shorts. (moma.org)

Imposed figures: the effects on the South of the politics decided on in the North, unequal exchange, ecological disaster. (diagonalthoughts.com)

BEPPIE is a moving and disarming portrait of an Amsterdam street urchin. Van der Keuken once described her as follows: 'She was ten years old and the joy of the Achtergracht, where I was living at the time. An Amsterdam child, sweet and crooked as a corkscrew.' (ubu.com)

Several filmmakers were asked to shoot short films, within a strict set of rules, for Dutch television. Van der Keuken's contribution takes certain artistic liberties.

Johan van der Keuken edited the remaining footage of his Amsterdam epic Amsterdam, Global Village into this short film.

It was made to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Milky Way (Melweg). The Milky Way is a multimedia venue in Amsterdam, which van der Keuken captured in THE SPIRIT OF THE TIME; it was established in the spirit of the '60s and became an international center of counterculture. Van der Keuken's free but highly formalized composition creates a milky way of images on the screen, drawing on drama, poetry and particularly music -- rock, new wave, Afro-Caribbean and punk.

This film pictures the Wadden Sea from various angles, focusing on the historic culture of the area, its economy, nature, and the emotional dimension of living and working in this area. In this, Van der Keuken delves deeply into a number of themes that influence the Wadden Sea, but that are also relevant from a broader perspective. (KG)

Between documentary and fiction, The master and the giant approaches the topic of the rivalry in the creation: a first God created the world, a second God destroyed it to build one new, better. Myth and reality meet in this film that puts in scene two different universes: a man and a woman in a neighborhood in demolition of Amsterdam, and images of the life in the confines of the tunecian Sahara. (KG)

Impressions of the Vietnam Opera's tour of Holland. (KG)

Part of Johan van der Keuken's North/South series, The White Castle focuses on the impact of the West on the underclass: on the concrete realities of their daily life and on the way their existence is isolated and frustrated. (imdb)

In a primary school of Amsterdam, the traditional teaching of the reading associates images with words. Johan van der Keuken plays with this method, gradually substituting the images of the reading board for others of the social reality and politics of its time. (KG)

De Deur (The Door) is the title of a volume of poems written by the Dutch poet Bert Schierbeek. Inspired by the death of his wife, the poems have the simplicity and the power of pain, softened by a touch of humour and the magic of language: to speak of one's loved one's absence is to make her present.(KG)

The tools people adopt to try and control nature. In parallel with the early history of Van der Keuken's child. (imdb)

This film was also van der Keuken's first explicitly political film, and was made in the period in which he developed his distinctive style of filmmaking: political but aesthetic, observant but engaged, personal, and reflexive. Highly composed sequences alternate with very "documentary" images, and in his editing the associational logic often prevails the argumentative logic. (KG)

A documentary highlighting the personality and talent of Ben Webster, the American saxophonist who adopted Amsterdam as his home. A living legend of jazz and blues, Webster is a person at once violent and gentle, generous and tormented. By filming the relationship between the man and his music, Johan van der Keuken reveals the hidden face of the musician, who was to die six years later. (KG)

When, in 1964, Van der Keuken was making his first film about blind children, one little boy stuck in his mind. Two years later the filmmaker went back to find him in order to make him the main subject of another documentary. Herman is on the threshold of puberty and is clear about his views on old age, intolerance and so-called normality. (KG)

How does a blind child percieve reality ? In order to explore this mystery, Johan van der Keuken spent two months in a specialised institution in the Netherlands. Blind Child reveals a world it is difficult to imagine : the unending struggle of the blind to remain in contact with reality. (KG)

A tryptich about his friend, poet & painter Lucebert. First part was a Tv command, second part is more like a free association game, and the last posthumous part is a visit at Lucebert's home, somewhat trying to find his ghost between all his paintings. (KG)

Documentary shows brass bands from Nepal, Surinam, Indonesia and Ghana. (imdb)

The dream-world of a fascist spy named Beauty. He destroys himself by attempting to impose a rigid working order on the world. In this film, Johan van der Keuken's camera simultaneously employs and destroys the classical narrative structure of gangster movies by lending multiple significations to the objects of man's environment. The recurring themes of Van der Keuken's work - time, violence, the perception of reality - are treated here with exceptional density.

This film explores the 1993 Sarajevo Film Festival which took place during the war in the country while the city was under siege. (imdb)

In the person of To Sang, a Chinese-born photographer living and working in Amsterdam, JVDK has found his perfect counterpart and alter ego. To Sang's monumental, stagey portrait photos reach back toward painting, just as JVDK's carefully composed film images recall still photography. Like JDVK, To Sang works in close collaboration with his wife. (KG)

Even Stilte is an early film by Van der Keuken that was essential for the development of his personal style. In this film, he attempts to depict Amsterdam in a loose and free manner. He set out with just his camera, without any predetermined concept. The result is a cinematic cityscape of Amsterdam created by a committed filmmaker